La bohème at The National Opera is an emotional rollercoaster ****

It is the most shameless and therefore ultimate tearjerker in operatic history: Puccini's La bohème. If the opera is performed even half right, by the end of the evening the entire audience leaves the hall with wet eyes and red cheeks, resistance is futile.

Poor artists in Paris, friendship, love, jealousy, illness, death, the loss of innocence and open-mindedness, it's all in there. No wonder the opera has been adapted into everything from a toe-curling musical (Rent) to Baz Luhrmann's curious film Moulin Rouge. The National Opera goes one step further: the premiere offers an emotional rollercoaster that will have the audience bouncing in all directions for two hours.

Admiration

The libretto of La bohème is very realistic. Even in the first act, where Mimi meets poet Rudolfo, well the nineteenth-century version of 'upstairs neighbour, can I borrow a cup of sugar'. They are both young and beautiful, in love up to their ears within fifteen minutes. She just coughs a lot and her hands are cold.

Indeed, 'tipo traviata', the pale tubercular face temporarily perceived as highly attractive and exciting in the first half of the nineteenth century. The illness was supposed to evoke bouts of euphoria and heightened sexual desire. But unlike Alfredo in Verdi's La traviata (1853) knows Rudolfo in La Bohème (1883) already what the ultimate consequence of Mimi's illness is.

Drama enough, then, and Australian director Benedict Andrews does not seek it in abstraction, but in his very musical direction moves the action to "the timeless present". The painter's studio is a now-abandoned schoolroom, made suitable for habitation by the four friends, otherwise Andrews shows the story, with an eye for detail. It even snows in the third act.

Predictable?

You would think so, but where most directors anxiously try to avoid sentiment, Andrews embraces it, with the result:

Moving

Wet eyes, red cheeks.

You know what's coming. Mimi is going to die. And you know the sounds, arming yourself minutes before the desperate 'Mimi!... Mimi!' sounds. But then again, it's like Rudolfo alone to you 'quel guardarmi cosi', why do you guys look like that?, says and...

Strong stuff huh, that Fisherman's friend....

Adoration

The previous productions of La bohème in Amsterdam (directed by Pierre Audi) were each plagued by an unbalanced cast. There is none of that now, quite the contrary. For not only are the major roles with Grazia Dorenzio (Mimi) and Atalla Ayan (Rudolfo) more than excellently cast, also in other roles Thomas Oliemans (Schaunard), Massimo Cavelletti (Marcello) and Gianluca Buratto (Colline) impress. With Harry Teeuwen as Doganiere, one can plainly speak of a luxurious cast. And it doesn't stop there.

"I think I'm in love with Musetta," I sighed to my neighbour in the break, "no, I'm sure."

The role of Musetta is secretly the finest in the entire opera anyway, and it's a pity she has so little to sing, but Joyce El-Khoury shifts up a gear, bubbles like a good glass of champagne and tantalises all the senses from the first second she enters the stage. And you do know that - like champagne, like the cherry chocolates the neighbour feeds you - Musetta is actually bad for you, but just resist.

In the case of El-Khoury: impossible.

Marvel

Then you are outside. It's cold, what do you want, it's December, the ideal month for a new production of La bohème to present. But it is not snowing and the wind is not too bad. To the left, a sign that you are more likely to associate with traffic warnings warns of white heroin being sold as cocaine. You know that image, from the news.

You wonder what makes the poignancy give way to wonder faster than usual.

You see a ridiculously expensive sports car gasping after the traffic light changes colour. And think: exactly as the orchestra played tonight. Wonderful, but then too fast, then too slow, nowhere smooth, nowhere with the long lines Puccini managed to create in each of the four acts.

You can see conductor Renato Palumbo in front of you again, gesticulating excessively during the performance where it seemed as if he wanted to personally pull every long-held high note out of the soloists. But also how he told us before the start in a very hoarse voice that we should be glad he did not have to sing this evening: 'I'm very ill.'

It will be his Italian sense of drama, but this La bohème can, when Palumbo is not driving the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra as if he were in a Ferrari for the first time, turn into a true triumph.

Furthermore, I am still in love with Joyce El-Khoury's Musetta.